kidmercury

Like Kid Mercury, I see plenty of people being "bedroom rock stars" -- folks making and distributing their music straight from their room. The most recent person I've found whom I've become a fan of is Julia Nunes.

Here is Julia's fantastic video of her cover of the Destiny's Child song "Survivor."


From Julia we can learn much about the future of music, particularly for bedroom rock stars. Such as:

1. Cover songs. Julia gained her passionate fan base -- over 37,000 subscribers on YouTube at the time of this writing -- largely through cover songs. There are clearly copyright issues at play here, though I believe the remix economy is destined, and will be advantageous for all parties involved.
2. Monetization. Monetization is through the sale of merchandise and live performances. This is especially interesting, as many musicians, especially those that aren't independently publishing, don't profit much from record sales, and rely more on touring for revenue. For this reason, I think we'll see more and more bedroom rock stars, and musicians releasing music for free on the web knowing that it is essentially the most inexpensive advertising for their live performances, which is their profit center (and of course it makes for a much better live performance if people actually know the songs!). Of course there is the "ego" issue of musicians feeling like they are not respecting themselves if they give away their music for free. As the web becomes the dominant form of music distribution, though, psychological perception will change -- and status will go to those who are most syndicated and remixed (in other words, those who are most pirated).

Next Step: Making the Brand

I believe the next step for bedroom rock stars, like pretty much all revenue-seeking Internet publishers, is to develop their own niche social network. This will allow the following:

1. Better dialogue with customers, which will fuel greater sales
2. Development of a customer profile (i.e. what each person likes, a record of what they bought, etc)
3. Advertising revenue opportunities
4. The ability to build a brand -- a style, an image, that can be used to sell even more merchandise. If the fans are passionate enough, the brand can be used to sell them anything -- so long as the sales pitch authentically sells the brand. Clearly defining the brand will be an issue here -- much like it currently is, but even more so (and more importantly, there needs to be an alignment between the brand and the music...the music needs to be an ad for the brand, which can only be done if the brand is developed with the music in mind).

Rock Stars: The World Beyond the Nation State?

As we have discussed many times before here on KidMercuryBlog, niche social networks could serve to replace governments as nation-states around the world begin to collapse. In my opinion, niche social networks are the ticket to the "customer profile" -- the set of data about individuals (everything about them....who they are, who their friends are, what they bought, what they like, etc). This is why Facebook and MySpace are worth so much (for now) -- because of the valuable customer profiles they have (though the profiles have significant room for improvement, and much of the hype and valuations surrounding the big social networks will eventually go to systems that enable and profit from the coming explosion of niche social networks).

Privacy advocates are naturally concerned about the customer profile (to learn more see our book review of Spychips). Fundamentalist Christians are also likely to view the customer profile as the "mark of the beast" prophecied in Revelations 13:16-18. I view many of their concerns as quite valid; your customer profile will ultimately include your digital money, and thus those who control your customer profile will control your ability to engage in commerce -- precisely what the Biblical verse warns against. The key, though, is trust. People tend to trust their rock stars, or any artist/publisher that has the right combination of honesty and charisma. So who knows: in the not too distant future, the rock star whose social network you're a part of may be more important than the geographical country you're living in!